Quote Originally Posted by ghettopalmetto View Post
What the numbers are saying is, it costs $22 an hour to employ a UNION electrician--INCLUDING wages, health insurance, pension, paid training, and paid vacation/sick time--in parts of Alabama. If you know anything about business, then you know that wages are a fraction of that cost.

As much as you'd like to pretend this is an academic exercise [[electricians will magically flock from Alabama to higher-wage states like Michigan--whoops, not anymore!--Massachusetts) instantaneously, reality has a way of disrupting that pleasant dream.

We're talking about peoples' livelihoods here. Their families. Their well-being and ability to eat. And you so much as dismiss them out-of-hand as a fictional story problem from your Ayn Rand textbook.

This is the labor market for which you're advocating. Prepare to bend over and time warp to the 1890s.
So why don't we just pass a law that all electricians get paid $200k/year? In fact, why stop there, we can pay janitors $100k and mechanics $150k, we can increase all of their wages so that everyone is rich!

Except when you raise wages, the cost of everything goes up with it and therefore you're not any better off. Any discussion of wages that doesn't factor in cost of living is meaningless.

Allowing regions to compete with each other for skilled workers is the only way to ensure that backwards regions either get with the times or suffer from permanent brain drain.